(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automation system and its control method. More particularly, this invention relates to an automation system and its control method used in the fabrication of semiconductor devices, thin film transistor liquid crystal displays (xe2x80x9cTFT-LCDxe2x80x9d), etc.
(b) Description of the Related Art
An automation system utilized in a conventional TFT-LCD assembly line, as shown in FIG. 1, includes a plurality of machines 30axcx9c30n, a plurality of machine servers 20axcx9c20n that correspond one-to-one to those plurality of machines and a host 10 controlling the machine servers.
The machines 30axcx9c30n. process a plurality of subjects such as glass, wafer, etc., stored in a work assembly 40 like a cassette under the control of machine servers. The machines 30axcx9c30n send job result data on the subjects to the corresponding machine servers 20axcx9c20n. 
The automation system utilized in the conventional TFT-LCD assembly line is described referring to FIG. 1. In FIG. 1, suppose that a first machine 30a is a tester and a second machine 30b is a repairer.
First, the tester 30a picks up the glasses in the work assembly 40, the cassette, moving by an automatic guided vehicle (xe2x80x9cAGVxe2x80x9d), which is an automatic transport system controlled by a controller, and then tests the glasses respectively. The job result data on the glasses are stored in a hard disk in the tester. After the test, the cassette 40 moves to the repairer 30b by the AGV.
The repairer 30b needs to repair the glasses using the job result data from the previous tester 30a. In the conventional system, an operator directly copies the job result data stored in the hard disk, to a floppy disk and then input them to the repairer 30b. Based on the job result data, the repairer 30b repairs the glasses.
The conventional system is inconvenient because the job result data of the tester 30a have to be stored in the hard disk of the tester 30a, copied to the floppy disk and input to the repairer 30b. The system also renders unnecessary delays when the floppy disk has an error. Also, since an operator manually exchanges the job result data, the conventional system may not work properly.
To resolve the above described problems, instead of a floppy disk, another conventional system uses a serial communication cable such as RS-232C to connect the tester and the repairer, and the job result data are transferred from the tester to the repairer through the cable.
However, since RS-232C is for a one-to-one communication, the tester can only share the data with the repairer connected by a cable. Hence, the conventional system using cables cannot cope with a system that a plurality of machines have to share with others the job result data executed in one machine. For this reason, an operator cannot but move the floppy disk directly from one machine to the other machines. Furthermore, the communication using RS-232C is slow and it takes too much time when transmitting a large amount of job result data.
An object of the present invention is to overcome the above-described problem. Another object of the present invention is to connect all machines to a file server by a network, sharing the job result data with all machines, automatically supplying the job result data to all machines.